BioMed X – Merck collaboration in the field of selective kinase inhibitors reaches major milestone

Heidelberg, Germany, January 13, 2016 – BioMed X Innovation Center and Merck announced today that their collaboration, under which Merck has acquired all generated research and development results in the field of selective kinase inhibitors from BioMed X, has reached a major milestone. In addition, the respective research group at BioMed X is now offering a unique set of bio- and cheminformatics services to research institutes and companies world-wide.

BioMed X and Merck have jointly developed a unique innovation model which combines a global crowdsourcing approach with local incubation of the brightest ideas and research talents. Merck became the first partner of BioMed X in 2013. At the BioMed X Innovation Center on the life science campus of the University of Heidelberg, BioMed X and Merck jointly set up three new research groups. One of them, led by Simone Fulle, has developed novel bioinformatics tools that enable the design of highly selective inhibitors of kinases, a relatively large protein family which plays an important role in many human diseases such as cancer and chronic inflammation.

“We are very proud of this early proof of concept of our new innovation model”, said Christian Tidona, founder and Managing Director of BioMed X. “Now it is evident that our unique research and development approach delivers significant value to our pharma partners.”

About BioMed X Innovation Center

The BioMed X Innovation Center is an exciting new collaboration model at the interface between academia and industry. At our center, distinguished early career scientists recruited from all over the world are working jointly on novel pre-clinical research projects in the fields of biomedicine, molecular biology, cell biology, diagnostics and bioinformatics. These interdisciplinary project teams are conducting groundbreaking biomedical research in an open innovation lab facility on the campus of the University of Heidelberg, under the guidance of experienced mentors from academia and industry while expanding their scientific network and receiving an entrepreneurship and leadership training. Each team is typically sponsored by a corporate pharma or biotech partner of BioMed X. After a fully funded project term, successful projects are either internalized into the development pipeline of the respective pharma or biotech sponsor or spun off into an independent startup company.

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